After growing up on a cherry farm in Yamhill, Oregon, and attending Harvard and then the University of Oxford, Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1984. Over the course of his 40-year career, he has lived on four continents, reported in six and traveled to more than 100 countries, cementing himself as one of the foremost journalists of his generation. Kristof’s reporting has earned him two Pulitzer Prizes: one in International Reporting in 1990, with his wife and New York Times colleague Sheryl WuDunn, for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and one in Commentary in 2006, for his coverage of the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. He served as Times bureau chief three times over, in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, as well as a senior editor in charge of the Sunday edition of the Times. Since 2001, Kristof has been an opinion columnist for the paper, aside from a brief hiatus. (He resigned from his post in 2021 to run in the Oregon gubernatorial election, but when he was found to not meet the state’s residency requirements and ineligible, he rejoined the Times.) He has written five books with WuDunn; his latest – and first solo – book, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” a memoir about his career as an international journalist, comes out May 14, and he will speak at First Parish Church on May 16. We interviewed Kristof on April 19; his words have been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to write a memoir, and when and how did you start writing it?
I had a lot of help from the Oregon secretary of state when he kicked me out of the governor’s race! All of a sudden, I had some free time, and I wanted to write about larger issues that concern me. I thought it was a good moment to look back and see what I could say about the things that I’ve been able to cover, and what they illuminated about America and about the world. I think there’s a lot of despair around the country, about the state of America and the state of the world, and I totally understand the reasons for that. But I managed to come away from all the things that I’ve covered and still feel a lot of hope, and so I wanted to convey that and explain why I feel that way.
You say “journalism is an act of hope.” What does it mean to you to be “Chasing Hope”?
Journalists have this reputation as cynics, but why would journalists run toward gunfire or spend weekends poking through incredibly boring financial statements if it wasn’t for some belief that if you cover something, it can lead to change? I deeply believe that. When I’m covering crises, I’m scared of gunmen, or scared of this or scared of that, but I am motivated by this idea that if one covers something, we can make people spill their coffee – lead them to act and result in better outcomes. I’ve seen real progress over the course of my reporting career. I think that’s not a reason for complacency, but to prod us to work a little, to push a little more with our shoulders and see what else we can achieve.
What was it like to comb through your own life? Did it make you think about anything differently?
I’ve always distrusted eyewitnesses, a little bit because of my criminal justice reporting, so it’s a little awkward to write a memoir when you’re the eyewitness of your life. But I did reach out to a lot of old friends who had been through the things that I had been through to see if their memories coincided with mine, and to my pleasant surprise, they largely did. The writing was also a way of working through a certain amount of trauma. I hadn’t really thought about it until writing the book, but I sort of realized in the course of it that I probably have a mild case of PTSD. Frankly, it was cathartic to look back and excavate some of those memories, and also to see that, by and large, reporting tended to do a certain amount of good.
You’ve written books before, but always with Sheryl, and always reporting-based nonfiction. What was it like writing by and about yourself?
People always ask, how do you write a book together and stay married? Now the test was, how do you write a book on your own and actually produce something at the end? It felt a little bit strange, to look in the mirror and interview myself: Dodge my own questions, and then come back and grill myself a little more. It made me think more deeply about the kinds of journalism that I had engaged in, critiques of it and how I would answer those critiques. I spent a lot of time in my journalism career pretty close to the edge of what is appropriate. I bought two girls from their brothels in Cambodia and took them back to their families. Is that really appropriate for a journalist? I don’t know. I also helped a dissident who had escaped from prison flee China; a New York Times correspondent shouldn’t really be helping escaped felons flee the country. There were a lot of things that I did that were right at the margins, and it was useful to think about them and try to think back about what felt appropriate, whether I had crossed lines here and there, and what the broader lessons for journalism were about having a purpose.
You’ve lived in and reported from so many places – is there one that, having looked back, feels especially important or close to your heart?
I think it would probably be China. Reporting in China early in its economic rise and covering the Tiananmen movement left a deep impression on me. You never quite recover from seeing a modern army turn its guns on crowds of pro-democracy protesters and just start massacring people. I think the rise of China was one of the most important things happening in the world, and it was a privilege to be able to witness that, but at the same time, I was tailed every time I left our apartment and I was renounced by the government. So I had very conflicted feelings about China, mirrored by the fact that I was seeing people massacred on the one hand, but also seeing the greatest number of people lifted out of poverty in a short period ever, in history. I continue to be conflicted about all that, but it remains near and dear to my heart.
- Nicholas Kristof reads from “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life” in conversation with Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust at 7 p.m. May 16 at First Parish Church, 3 Church St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, in a Harvard Book Store event. $12, or $40 with book. Information is here.
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